On January 26, 2022, North Korea News reported that a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack took down its Internet. It was the second time in a month the country lost access to the internet.
Junade Ali, a cybersecurity researcher, told Reuters: “It’s common for one server to go offline for some periods of time, but these incidents have seen all web properties go offline concurrently. It isn’t common to see their entire internet dropped offline.”
Earlier in the day, North Korea had conducted military tests, and many assumed the cyberattack was perpetrated by another country as a punishment. But the hacker responsible, known only as P4x, came forward to Wired with proof that he did the deed. And he added some crucial details to the story – he conducted the hack from his home in the US while watching Aliens in his pajama pants and eating spicy corn snacks.
“It felt like the right thing to do here. If they don’t see we have teeth, it’s just going to keep coming. I want them to understand that if you come at us, it means some of your infrastructure is going down for a while,” he told Wired.
P4x has no plans to stop there. He plans to get another hacker involved to try it all again – and this time he wants to steal information.
During the attack, any sites housed on the North Korean internet went dark, as did most email. However, North Korean citizens were still able to access websites hosted in other countries. – WTF Fun Facts